I showed great willpower refusing a cooked breakfast, despite smashed avocado and poached eggs on toast being on the menu, instead I feasted on cereals, yoghurt and toast. The Old Bell Inn made an effort with food, last night I ate gin cured gravlax with pickled cucumber, followed by curried monkfish in dahl. Only the cheesecake for dessert (not the baked kind) with its rather rubbery topping let them down, but the edible (I hope) flowers were pretty.
I returned to the Oldham Way by a slightly different route, admiring the houses built of gritstone. Even the modern houses have been faced with the stone. Initially the freshly worked stone is a mellow, yellowy ochre that blackens with time, so that most of the houses that line the valley look pretty black. Historically I imagine smoke from the many coal fires used to heat people's homes might have been responsible, however it is also said that algae entering the pores of the rock blacken it. As I climbed out of the valley I examined a freshly broken surface of the stone in a dry stone wall that looked recently repaired. Quartz and feldspar were the dominant minerals in this coarse grained sandstone, with specks of some black mineral. Orange staining indicated the presence of iron oxide and gave the stone its yellow hues.
Having exhausted my investigation of the dry stone walls I plodded on. The weather had changed. Warmer than it had been, without the biting easterly wind, there were a few light showers. Over the morning I followed tracks along the hillside among fields above the urban sprawl that spread like a river down the valley floors. On a promontory there was an obelisk dedicated to thise who died in the First and Second World Wars. An outcrop of rock which children were climbing on formed an excellent viewpoint although today the visibility was poor, the views obscured by water laden air.
Later I admired the Dove Stone reservoir at the base of the Chew Valley. Nearby I spotted people spread on a nearby slope peering at the ground, some with bright yellow gilets. Curious as to what they were doing, I enquired of a man standing nearby. He said they were part of an RSPB effort to plant wild flowers. He gave me two small packets of wild flower seeds to scatter on the path-side, which I duly did. I felt confident they would not grow. Plants have their own means of distributing themselves and only thrive when they have found their ecological niche, the set of conditions most favourable to them.
The path proceeded up the Chew Valley on the left hand side then about turned, and went down the other side in a lengthy "V". It was an area that my father-in-law was fond of. Somewhere among the irregular teeth of blackened gritstone on the skyline his ashes were scattered.
The E2 switched from the Oldham Way to the Tameside Way, and after passing a cluster of houses climbed back into the moors for several kilometres visiting two more reservoirs.
Reaching Hollingworth I departed from the E2 to walk a mile or so to my hotel in Hattersley, following a busy road, its hedgerows strewn with litter. It was rush hour, nose to tail cars heading home, headlights bright under a darkening sky. It made feel thankful to be retired but also made it difficult to cross the roads. As I waited at a crossing with traffic lights at one junction for a lengthy period I noticed a metal figure seated on a bench opposite. Maybe he had to wait so long for the lights to change he turned to steel.
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